Nathan Alan Davis will run the University’s MFA Playwriting Program, and Megan Sandberg-Zakian is the new artistic director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.

BU Theatre

Longtime Collaborators Raising the Curtain on a New Era for Playwriting at BU

Megan Sandberg-Zakian to lead Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Nathan Alan Davis new head of MFA Playwriting Program

As Megan Sandberg-Zakian tells it, her collaboration with Nathan Alan Davis began over ice cream.

She was directing the world premiere of his play Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea at the Cleveland Public Theatre in 2015, and she became intrigued by an old-fashioned ice cream shop down the street.

After rehearsal one day, “People were like, let’s go out to the bar, and he said, ‘No, we should go to the ice cream shop,’” Sandberg-Zakian says. “This is my person, who wants to go have a hot fudge sundae instead of a drink right now, which is very, very much me.”

“We did have ice cream at least once,” Davis says. “But for me, [the connection] was the first phone call I had with her before I met her. The way that she thinks about theater, the questions she asks, how deeply she is engaged in trying to unearth what a play is to be. I think we have a similar viewpoint about the necessity of theater and how it can really be a place that we can envision the world we want to live in.”

Now BU is about to find out what they can do together.

In July, Davis was named a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of the practice of playwriting, and he will run the University’s MFA Playwriting Program. In August, Sandberg-Zakian was named the new artistic director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT), which in alternate years produces the thesis plays of the University’s MFA writers and of program alums.

Together they are taking over for Kate Snodgrass (GRS’90), who filled both roles before retiring June 30, having joined the program 35 years ago under its founder, the late Nobel Laureate Derek Wolcott (Hon.’93), a CAS professor of English.

“They are just spectacular choices,” Snodgrass says. “I’m thrilled to have them running the show. They have a working relationship already, which is serendipity. And I’m sure that they will have ideas about how to mesh the program with the theater, and make everything even better.”

Davis comes to BU from Princeton University, where he was a lecturer in theater and the Berlind Playwright-in-Residence. A freelance director and consultant for the last decade or so, Sandberg-Zakian may be known to theater-loving Bostonians for directing this summer’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company production of Much Ado About Nothing on the Boston Common. Yes, it was hot.

“It was theater as extreme sport in a way being out there, and it was really intense,” she says. Six-plus-hour rehearsals, sometimes in the sun, were tougher than the two-hour evening performances, though. They took 10-minute cooling breaks every hour in air-conditioned trailers, had hydration stations everywhere around the set, and downed lots of ice pops and frozen Gatorade.

“But other than that, it was cool, amazing,” she says. “Just walking out there every night and seeing thousands of people, Bostonians of every stripe gathered, excited about seeing live theater—it was magical. I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

The production was special to her for one other reason.

“It was a version of Much Ado where Beatrice and Benedict are both women, and every night the audience would cheer when they kissed, and as I’m married to a woman, I was very moved to see that,” says Sandberg-Zakian, who lives in Jamaica Plain with her wife. “It’s like people were cheering for my relationship every night, and you know, that was really exciting.”

A graduate of Brown University and with an MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College, she recently published a book of essays, There Must Be Happy Endings: On a Theater of Optimism and Honesty (The 3rd Things, 2020), and has been busy working as a consultant to theater organizations. But the core of her career has been as a director, at venues ranging from the Lyric Stage and the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston to the California Shakespeare Theatre. She describes herself as a “new play person,” nurturing new works from the beginning of her career: her first job out of Brown was teaching “playmaking” classes to nine-year-old writers at the 52nd Street Project in Hell’s Kitchen. 

Sandberg-Zakian has a long association with BPT. In 2011, she directed theater founder Walcott’s Ti-Jean and His Brothers, a coproduction between BPT and Cambridge’s Underground Railway Theater for BPT’s 30th anniversary. She has also directed for the Boston Theater Marathon and the Massachusetts Young Playwrights’ Project.

This year’s BPT schedule had already been set by Snodgrass and will be announced in a few weeks. Sandberg-Zakian says she won’t be directing this season or next—there’s plenty for a new artistic director to do—but she may after that.

Her work with Davis includes directing Dontrell in Cleveland and his Nat Turner in Jerusalem at New York Theatre Workshop, and this winter the two will launch a third, The High Ground, at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage.

“She makes it a priority to have everybody in the room,” Davis says. “She engages a whole community around the work. She’ll be very purposeful about getting the viewpoints from an array of people and synthesizing them and communicating them, you know, to me or to the collaborators. It’s all about trying to hone the vision of what this particular play is.”

Davis is an alum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University Bloomington, and The Juilliard School. His plays have been produced, commissioned, and/or developed by such notable companies as the Roundabout Theatre in New York, Seattle Rep, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Mass., among many others. Sandberg-Zakian describes his work as “a potent and instructive collision of history and poetry.”

“He is a gifted writer himself with a lyrical yet muscular command of language,” Snodgrass says. “In this, he reminds me very much of Derek [Walcott], our founder. Plus, Nathan is a consummate teacher of playwriting, and he finds great joy in working with passionate writers ready to try new things.”

“The thing that I tend to always try to keep front and center for myself in my teaching,” Davis says, “is the idea that every playwright inherently has the capacity to write great plays within them. And so I really try to have my teaching be a way to help them open doors to their own selves, to try to let people really unearth what’s within them.

“It’s just a question of: to what extent can we support them, you know, to what can we help guide them?” says Davis, who will split his time between New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and three children, and Boston.

“I really gravitate to plays that seem to hold up the power of language,” he says. “I’m always excited by the fact that with theater, you know an entire world unfolds simply from the words spoken on stage, and so obviously with Derek Walcott, what he’s done in the realms of both poetry and theater, reminds us of the importance of that sensibility of really evaluating the power of words. I’m inspired by that when I write, and I think I’m excited for that to continue to be a part of the DNA of the program.”

Both Sandberg-Zakian and Davis have theater in their family and learned to love it from an early age. Sandberg-Zakian grew up in Seattle with a father who was a playwright and a mother who was a molecular biologist, one of the first women to succeed in her field and “an incredible example,” she says.

“I went to her lab a lot when I was a kid. She always talks about how science is as great as the arts are in terms of: you try something, and you see what happens, and then you try something else. And I did.”

Davis grew up in Rockford, Ill., where his father was an actor and his mother a mime, although both sometimes worked other jobs. He started out as an actor himself. “I grew up valuing the arts, because that’s just what we sort of did. Even though there wasn’t a lot of it around, if it was around we were part of it.”